Halting State

“Elsie died six years ago, Hackman. Your blacknet friends are lying to you.”

And it’s true, and the confession rips you back to that horrible morning in the mortuary down south where they showed you the photographs, then waited while you got a grip on yourself and blew your nose and wiped your eyes—you didn’t throw up until later, after the sixth pint of the evening—and were very sorry, sir, to put you through this, but we need to know, we need to know who was in the car because after it came out from underneath the articulated lorry you had no family at all, you had no life, and that was when you began paying the Absent Friends subscription, because even the simulacrum of your sister and nieces gives you something to talk about, it’s better than nothing at all. People instinctively know when a member of the herd is the last of their kind, and you can’t live with the sympathetic glances, and you can’t live with the isolation, either, and how were you to know? It’s just your reality, these days, an embarrassing ghost you’ve dragged around with you ever since the accident. A bodyguard of ghosts.

The ghosts surround you as you stand up and take a step away from Elaine, away from the desk where the zombie-haunted laptop is co-ordinating the automatic mop-up operation to a war Hackman doesn’t even know is happening, a second step to widen the gap and close with Marcus as the gun barrel turns to track you and shoots.

BANG.

You didn’t know it could be that loud: It’s not just a noise, like in the games, it’s a solid force hammering on your eardrums and punching at you. But you take another step and reach for the gun.

BANG.

This time you feel something like a punch in the ribs. But you’re close enough to grab at Hackman’s arm, now, even though your legs don’t seem to want to work properly. It’s very odd: You’ve almost got your hand on the gun-barrel, but it’s getting farther away, and what’s the ceiling doing? Something hits you appallingly hard in the back, and then your head’s in agony as you whack it on the floor, and the gun is still pointing at you, with Hackman’s face behind it, snarling like a shark that’s scented blood on the boardroom carpet and is about to bite your throat out—

Then Elaine takes a brisk step forward, straightening up from where she’s grabbed something from her bag with both hands, pivots smartly on her left ankle, and swings a huge sword over him in a motion like the windscreen wiper from hell. Through your ringing ears you hear a crunch of bone. And the last thing you see is Hackman, a surprised expression on his face, toppling towards you, as Elaine staggers with the effort of halting the instinctive backstroke that would take his face off.

Restart:

A white plastic ceiling above you, lights, and a green shape hunched over your face. Some kind of mask. Whatever you’re lying on jars painfully as the wheels ride over speed pillows. And you wish they’d turn off the siren.

Been here before. Didn’t like it any better the first time. “Looks like he’s coming round.”

Nope, sorry.

Restart:

You’ve been shot in the chest, in case you hadn’t guessed. Twice—once wasn’t enough for you? So you had to go and be a hero, because you knew what Hackman didn’t know you knew, which is that his friends on the other end of the anonymously remixed blacknet link, Team Red, had already tried to kill you a couple of times over: And to make things better, Hackman had already iced his partner in insider trading, Wayne Richardson, and it therefore followed that he wasn’t about to leave you or Elaine behind to point the finger at him. Because that’s what blacknets are good for: buying illegal handguns, arranging executions, raising dirty money at insane short-term interest rates to invest in a gamble that your own corporation is going to tank within weeks.

And you’d been meaning to tell Elaine about your lack of a real life sometime, anyway.

But getting yourself shot wasn’t clever, was it? It hurts. It’s down to a dull ache now—either you’re dying, or they whacked you full of morphine—and you can breathe, but there’s something annoying in your nose. Maybe opening your eyes would be a good idea, although they’re hot and gummy, and you feel almost as fuzzy as that time in Amsterdam, sitting in a burning chair by a canal and a broken shop window.

(Burning? Why did you think the chair was on fire?)

You manage to crowbar your eyelids apart. It’s a huge effort, but it’s rewarded by a worried face, blurred but recognizable, a ferret sniffing over its prey as if unable to decide whether to bite or groom it. “Jack?” She squeezes your hand. “Jack?”

“Grrrrumph.” That’s a highly compressed shorthand version of are you alright? Did Hackman get away? Where are the police? And what’s happening? Unfortunately, your throat didn’t work too well, so you cough and try again: “’Laine?”

She squeezes your hand so hard you’re afraid she’s going to crush it. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Then she lets go abruptly, as if she’s suddenly realized what she’s doing and got self-conscious. “For fuck’s sake,” she bursts out suddenly. “You really scared me!”

I scared you? you think, but it’s too much of an effort to say that. “Hackman?”

She sniffs, misunderstanding. “Untrained handgun versus trained sword at that range? I was just waiting for a chance to draw on him.” She’s still holding your hand. There’s steel in those fingers, you realize. “Good thing for his sake it was blunt when I went into krumphau on him, or he’d be missing both hands.”

Well, duh. You blink, feeling stupid. She told you she was into mediaeval sword-fighting, didn’t she? What did you expect?

“Sorry. You scared the crap out of me, Jack.” Pause. “How do you feel?”

Your throat feels like it’s on fire, and there’s definitely something wrong with your chest: It makes odd crackling noises when you breathe, and you can’t quite get enough air. “Water,” you say hopefully. You’re too tired to worry about anything else. Besides, she’s here, and she’s in the chair by your—hospital bed? —so she must be okay. “Phone?”

“I phoned Sophie,” she says. “After they rebooted the phone system.” She looks apprehensive: that same facing-the-noose expression you saw earlier, back when…

“You know, then.”

She nods. “They told me everything.”

The mummy lobe—what’s left of it—closes your eyes, out of embarrassment, or respect for the dead, or something. “I couldn’t handle it back then. Not six months after Mum died. I just couldn’t handle being on my own.” The mummy lobe is tired, too: tired of holding you together through lonely years of death-march work and playing at real life, tired of emulating the society you’ve been so cut off from for so long.

“But to try blackmailing you—” She breaks off.

“How were they to know that Sophie wasn’t real? They were sub-contracting hands-on stuff to a local blacknet. Probably gave it to some local muscle down south who’s laughing his rocks off. Like the story about the police who send this guy a photograph of his car, speeding, and a fine: So he sends them a photograph of a cheque. And they send him back a photograph of a pair of handcuffs…”

Cold little fingers insert themselves into your hand, kneading. “But you don’t need to be alone, if you don’t want to,” she says hesitantly. “You do know that, don’t you?”

“I do now.” You squeeze her fingers, as hard as you can, which is about drowned- rat strength right now. “Game over.”

SUE: Plea Bargain

“…So I was nattering wi’ the heid zombie in the hotel lobby when I heard the shots. The front-desk video take will show me lookin’ scunnered. It was two stories up, but I knew what they was immediately—that’s when I called, as I ran upstairs. It was all history by the time I got there, she had him on the floor with that sword of hers,